Squarespace to Shopify Migration: What Actually Moves

Should You Migrate — and When to Stay

Squarespace is a website builder that added commerce; Shopify is a commerce platform that added content. That difference is the whole story of this migration. You own your store on either, so this isn’t a rescue mission — it’s a fit decision. The table below shows where the two platforms model commerce differently, which is exactly where migration takes planning.

Where Shopify Is Actually Worse

A migration guide that only sells the destination isn’t worth your time, so here are the places Shopify is genuinely worse for a Squarespace merchant. First, product structure: Shopify lets a product carry up to 2,048 variants but only three options, while Squarespace gives you six. Any product with four or more option types needs an app or theme code on Shopify.

The 2,048 is also a platform ceiling rather than a guaranteed one — Shopify notes that some third-party themes, theme app extensions, public apps and sales channels might not support more than 100 variants — so a Squarespace product near its own 250 limit needs the destination theme checked before you move it.

Second, payments. Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee — 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus — whenever you take payments through a gateway other than Shopify Payments.

Third, content: Squarespace’s page and blog editor is more flexible than Shopify’s, so content-led sites lose some polish. For the full, unvarnished list, read our honest take on the disadvantages of Shopify before you weigh it against what pushed you to look.

When Staying (or Adding Shopify) Wins

There’s a middle path worth knowing before you commit to a full replatform: if your real gap is commerce features rather than the whole platform, you can keep your Squarespace site and add Shopify’s checkout to it. Our guide to adding Shopify to an existing website covers when that beats moving everything.

What Moves, What Doesn't, and What You Rebuild by Hand

Squarespace exports your data in pieces: products as a CSV, content as an XML file, and contacts, orders and gift cards as their own CSVs. The matrix below is the honest picture of what lands, what needs a workaround, and what simply doesn’t come with you.

The Export Traps Squarespace Hides

Two exports surprise people. Product images aren’t bulk-exportable — Squarespace only lets you download them one at a time from the Asset library, so a large catalog is real, tedious work (migration tools re-host images for you, which is one reason they earn their fee).

And the product CSV is a one-way snapshot: edits you make to it don’t sync back. Above all, mind the timing — once your Squarespace subscription ends, the site goes offline, and its image URLs are nothing you can rely on.

Reviews, Design and Content You Rebuild

Some things aren’t a migration at all — they’re a rebuild. Product reviews are the clearest example: Shopify states the position plainly. Its own Shop product reviews only collect new reviews from Shop customers and show them in the Shop app, so to carry your review history onto the storefront you re-add it in an app such as Judge.me or Yotpo after launch.

Your design is the bigger rebuild. Squarespace blocks and templates don’t convert to Shopify sections, so the storefront is built fresh from a Shopify theme — plan for that if your Squarespace site was a big part of your brand. Content pages, member areas and custom forms are recreated too. Creatives moving portfolio-led stores will find our guide to Shopify for photographers useful for galleries, prints and client work.

Migrate or Stay? Get Your Verdict

You’ve seen the upside and the friction. Still weighing whether to move at all? Answer five quick questions about your reasons, your capacity and your timing. If the SEO question gives you pause, don’t let it — redirects look scarier than they are, and the section below shows the work comes down to a CSV import.

This isn’t a sales pitch — a legitimate answer is “stay on Squarespace for now,” and the quiz will tell you so when that’s the honest call.

Protecting Your SEO: URLs, Redirects and Your Domain

Squarespace 7.1 puts a fixed /p/ in front of product slugs; Shopify uses fixed /products/<handle> paths. Almost none of your old URLs survive unchanged, and each one needs a redirect. Here’s how the common patterns map.

Building the 301 Redirect Map

Shopify lets you create up to 100,000 URL redirects on standard plans (20 million on Plus), and you can import them in bulk by CSV. Redirects work from broken (404) URLs; fixed Shopify paths can’t be redirected from, and a few reserved paths can’t be used at all — keep both out of your map.

The worry underneath all of this is whether you’ll lose traffic. Some short-term movement is normal on any replatform, and Google says so directly.

The takeaway: trust the complete redirect map, not luck, to hold your equity through that window. Migrations that lose traffic almost always skipped or botched redirects, or stranded old image URLs on a domain the merchant no longer controlled.

Moving Your Domain and DNS

If you bought your domain through a third party, you connect it to Shopify by updating DNS records at your provider — the domain stays registered there, and you keep managing and renewing it with them. If you later want the registration itself at Shopify, our guide to what a Shopify domain costs and who owns it covers transfers and renewals.

After you point the records at Shopify, propagation usually happens within two hours, but can take up to two days. Do the DNS switch only after your Shopify store is fully tested. The walkthrough below shows the domain move end to end.

Migration Methods: Manual CSV, a Tool, or a Specialist

With that cleared up, here’s what each of the three real routes is actually for.

For the tool route, a few names come up repeatedly — but Squarespace support varies, so check it before you buy. Prices below are observed and drift; confirm on each tool’s own page.

Whichever tool you pick, run its free demo or test migration first and inspect the results on sample products before committing. The video below walks through a Squarespace-to-Shopify move end to end, so you can see the flow before you start.

How Big Is Your Move — and What It Costs

Take a fairly typical Squarespace store: 120 products, 18 content pages and 45 blog posts. Add the one store page that becomes a Shopify collection, and that’s 120 + 18 + 45 + 1 = 184 URLs that each need a 301 redirect.

With order history to carry across, that lands you on the tool route — a migration app like LitExtension from $59 and a two-to-four-week move — rather than a by-hand CSV job. The estimator starts on that example; change the numbers to match your own site.

What Drives the Cost

If you’re sizing a full build rather than just the data move, our breakdown of Shopify store development cost maps every component with worked scenarios.

And if the answer is to hire it out, the harder skill is scoping the job and vetting whoever takes it. Our guide to hiring a Shopify developer covers the brief, the red flags and how to compare quotes, so you don’t overpay for a straightforward migration.

Your Cutover Playbook

One planning note before you start: keep selling on Squarespace while you build Shopify, so the two run in parallel. Run the main data import first, then freeze catalog changes and, right before you switch DNS, do a final delta export of any orders and customers added since — so nothing placed during the move falls through the gap between the two imports. The second timing rule is about when you cancel Squarespace.

Tick each step off as you go — the checklist saves your progress on this device.

The Bottom Line

Squarespace and Shopify are both capable hosted platforms; this is a fit decision, not a rescue. Merchants who move for a real reason — outgrowing Squarespace’s variant cap, needing a wider app ecosystem, or wanting Shopify’s checkout — and who respect the revenue-critical steps (the 301 redirect map, saving images before cancelling, and a clean cutover) come out ahead. Merchants who move on a whim usually don’t.

Frequently Asked Questions